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szczys (3402149) writes "Brian Benchoff used science and math to prove that the performance shown in the Lix Kickstarter video is questionable at best. Check his evidence and see if he's done an appropriate job of debunking the functionality presented."
From the Hackaday post: "While we know the video is an outright misrepresentation of what any USB 3 powered device can do, We can’t figure out if the Lix is a viable product. We’re turning to you. Can you figure out if the Lix pen actually works? All we know is the Lix pen has a 4.5 Watt power supply from a USB 3 port. It’s possible for a USB 3 powered 3D printing pen to work, albeit slowly, but the engineering is difficult and we don’t know if the Lix team has the chops."

It really isn't, but the issue here is that the differences in the properties of ABS plastic and the power source mean that this simply isn't possible as presented. A glue gun is powered from a wall, whereas this device is powered over USB. And typical glue in a glue gun melts at a fraction of the temperature that ABS plastic melts at.

Hot melt glue guns have to melt the end of a large-diameter cylinder of plastic. The lix melts just the tip of a 1.75mm cylinder. Much less wattage is needed. I don't know if enough wattage is available from a USB connection, but it may be. I can easily imagine a 2 or 3 watt light bulb melting the plastic fast enough. I think the USB spec is 4.5 watts at 5v.

The lix is still just a hot-melt glue gun, though a smaller version than commonly seen. There doesn't seem to be a claim on the lix website that it is c

Hot melt glue guns have to melt the end of a large-diameter cylinder of plastic. The lix melts just the tip of a 1.75mm cylinder. Much less wattage is needed. I don't know if enough wattage is available from a USB connection, but it may be. I can easily imagine a 2 or 3 watt light bulb melting the plastic fast enough. I think the USB spec is 4.5 watts at 5v.

The lix is still just a hot-melt glue gun, though a smaller version than commonly seen. There doesn't seem to be a claim on the lix website that it is controlled in any way by the computer, only that it is powered by a USB source. It could just as easily be powered by an external battery or power brick. Any resulting sculpture would be created in real time in the user's hand, and would not be designed before hand.

This. The novelty is the ability to extrude by pushing a button instead of shoving the material in manually.

The disclaimer above the video clearly says that portions of the video have been accelerated. Which is normal when watching demos of 3D printers, and also normal when watching artists demonstrate their process via video. So, you could hardly claim it was misleading or deceptive.

There's nothing indicating that there isn't a warm up time involved in using the pen, just like any other glue gun. It would seem pretty self evident to me that there's some sort of thermal mass inside the pen, surrounded by an insulating sheath to protect the users hands, and that you have to let it sit and warm up before you use it.

Did anyone else realize Brian Benchoff's not exactly "Mr Wizard' when they read the second paragraph of his post?

The device is powered through a USB 3 port. In the video, the Lix team is using a MacBook Pro. This has a USB port capable of delivering 900 mA at 5 Volts, or 4.5 Watts. Another 3D printing pen, the 3Doodler, uses a 2A, 12V power adapter, equal to 24 Watts. Considering the 3Doodler works, and they both do the same basic thing, there’s something extremely odd going on here.

All I could think was "Did you see that nerd pick up that pen? That nerd is a scrawny wimp. A football player is much stronger. Considering that football players can pick up a pen, there's something extremely odd going on here."

There are UBS wall outlets now so your comment is moot. Also, there was an assumption that it was powered by a macbook although the editing didn't show that. Sadly, Hackaday is about re-purposing electronics in new different ways. A skilled person could make a windows laptop inside a macbook shell, sand off the apple, put a pear on it (its a Nickelodeon thing) and then do the same video. That shows how pointless his argument was. The pen does have the ability to get hot enough to melt abs. USB specs for 3 a

Funny you would say this. I think I would have more trust if they would have used real artists being really astonished by the product, rather a few hipsters doing bad acting under a terrible effect that looks like an instagram filter. Also someone actually using the pen in wider shot may also have helped... The entire video smells of excessive fake marketing hype and that basically means a crap product.

Kickstarters have delivered thousands of products successfully, so they're clearly not all scams. There have been a few scams that made it onto the site, which were shut down as people dug into their claims - the "crowd" doesn't passively hand over money, they dig with impressive thoroughness when they think they're being taken advantage of, and Kickstart shuts down projects as a result of crowd investigations. Of course, Kickstarter also filters out many projects (presumably including most scams), so if you look at Kickstarter, the projects generally look plausible. Not all a good idea, of course, but that doesn't make them a scam. The result, for me, is that of the large number of Kickstarts that I've backed, only one was a scam (or massive incompetence) - the vast majority deliver, and the ones that don't are people who (as far as I can tell) honestly got in over their heads and couldn't pull it off, which is the risk that you have to accept when contributing to a startup. Kickstarter is not a store.

I can compare to the VC route. I've done two VC-backed startups (both ended in successful acquisitions, woot!), so I can make a comparison. If anything, because there's usually a lot less money in a Kickstarter than a VC-backed company, there's less incentive to scam, and greater transparency from Kickstarters than from people pitching VCs. And because Kickstarters are mainly shooting for modest goals, rather than VC's "shooting for the moon", the success rate for Kickstarts is a lot higher than VC-backed startups.

Even though they're both ways to fund things, Kickstarter and VCs are very different worlds. Kickstarter's average successful project raises $40K, and nobody gets equity. Most VCs aren't interesting in any deal that doesn't have a lot more zeroes in it, and of course they get tons of equity in return. Anywhere there's money on the table people will try scamming, but both Kickstarter and VCs have mechanisms to protect them from abuse, that work well enough that overall the systems work.

Do you mean the shirt that would be destroyed the first time it came into contact with a couch or chair back when the wearer sat down? Then there is the issue of washing the garment. Yeah, I agree, just ore stupid hype to get money from stupid people.

What we really need to do is cure cancer. We need to solve the cancer problem, because that very problem is what is affecting our world at a global level too. When we learn to cure that disease symptomatically identified as bloating of cancer cells [imgur.com], we will learn to stop the cycle of economic bloat, corruption and oligarchy.

Which "cancer problem"? There are over what, 200 different diseases all under the umbrella of "cancer," each requiring a different cure or preventative measure. Yeah, we need to figure out how some of the base line errors occur in cell replication et all, which will help prevent quite a few types of cancer, but there's never going to be a magic bullet -- a "cure" for "cancer."

What we need to do is cure the world from capitalism, in particular the delusion that economic growth will be sustained forever. This mistaken belief can, and will, kill many more people than cancer. Think war.

Economic growth would have been sustained if we had kept our citizens from sterilizing themselves. Too late now though.. damage is done.

From a practical perspective, yes, they really are. We use property laws, artificial scarcity and built-in obsolescence to create the fiction that they aren't so a few people who were born to power can maintain control over the rest of us. But it's all bullshit.

And this whole time I thought it was entropy, accelerated with an almost complete lack of forethought on recycling the finite amount of raw materials that exist in the first place that was the problem....

And this whole time I thought it was entropy, accelerated with an almost complete lack of forethought on recycling the finite amount of raw materials that exist in the first place that was the problem....

You thought wrong. The earth is vast and we huddle in our cities occupying a tiny portion of it.

If you're playing the "we, as a civilization, should only be focusing on our worst problems" - why pick cancer? People are dying much earlier of completely treatable diseases, or just lack of clean water and proper sanitation. I would say that on a global scale, these are worse problem than cancer, and our resources would stretch a lot longer trying to fix these problems, as they *per person helped* are relatively simple problems.

It's making something like 3D printing accessible to people who aren't into CAD. I have had a 3Doodler for a few months, and it's been a huge hit with my daughters, who are very artistic but not CAD-oriented. Even though it's the same extruder and plastic, the experience of drawing with plastic is very different from 3D printing with a printer, and it appeals to different people.

Of course it can work, just not continuously at that feed rate.Ever had a cheap hot glue gun where you had to wait north of a minute after not even half a stick so the internal thermal mass can heat back up to working temp? Same idea.

Many devices do not have a 100% available duty cycle. Welders, compressors etc. They tend to rely on your work-practices involving periods where you're not using the device. For a 3D pen, possibly would would be repositioning your work or considering your next step.

The pen is also huge for what it does. Maybe it has batteries inside and charges them when the power isn't needed for direct heating. The other thing that the claims aren't clear on is the power draw. USB3 can provide 100W. The 4.5W is an assumption based on the chassis holding the USB port. Who says they can't gut a MacBook for a trial? Though the wording in the video says "any USB" not "USB 3.0 capable of 100W operation". The debunk article makes so many assumptions that aren't in evidence that it

Hackaday's maths are wrong, they build it on the assumption that a length of filament clearly shorter than two fingers width is 13cm long. Hackaday's news quality has been going down lately, I wonder why Slashdot is quoting them more and more.

Exactly. That's like saying a 1.3hp compressor can't run a nail gun, operating on the assumption that you're constantly shooting nails out of it. Most hand work involves periods of activity mixed with periods of rest in-between.Depending on the task, a few seconds to a few minutes of buffer is usually enough. Even if we assume 10 minutes buffer, at an average of 4.5W that's 0.75Wh. If we assume a low li-ion energy density of 100Wh/kg (laptop cells are more like 200Wh/kg), that's a 7.6 gram battery. Is that

They also make the assumption that a MacBook-looking computer must be a MacBook, even when it isn't stated in the video. If I wanted to make my pen look cool, I'd put a 100W USB 3.0 port into a chassis that others would assume would be something different. That the technical details are so light on the kickstarter page indicates they know they are perhaps a little questionable. It's a small hot-glue gun with good marketing. How could something that simple not work?

Ok, I don't know if USB3 has enough wattage to do that. I've no idea what kind of plastic they're using, and that's going to be the most important factor here. As far as we know the things they created will melt if left in the window on a warm day. If that were the case, I'm fairly sure USB3 would have enough wattage.

When I was much younger I worked for a time running injection molding machines. As with most things in a factory the machines were getting old and had issues. One of them was that they'd leak after they were put into standby. 2 very heavy steel molds would come together and a nozzle would come forward and put 30 tons of pressure behind hot plastic. When it was break time I'd put the machine in standby which would keep the plastic and nozzle hot but relieve the pressure. Well, not all the pressure was gone so the nozzle would leak rather slowly. I quickly learned that if I took a piece of cardboard I could manipulate the flow of plastic out of the nozzle and make neat shapes. They looked almost exactly what they made in those videos. I find that a bit too much of a coincidences, so I'd have to say there's at least some credibility to what they're doing.

That being said, notice you can never see their other hand? I believe they are having to manually feed the plastic. Also, I don't think they are building vertically as it appears. The plastic probably wouldn't cool fast enough to allow that. I believe they are laying the plastic out on the paper, letting it could, then moving its position and tacking it there with a spot of new plastic. This was what I'd do. I made screwy flow pots, vases, coasters, etc... Finally, I want to point on that the ability to make stuff pretty much ends with what you see in the video. There wasn't much else you could do with it. Making anything that was robust enough for actual use would be nearly impossible.

So you need a computer, or at least a power supply with a USB port, to power a heater and motor? I have some doubts about the thing being cool enough to hold, too. Your fingers are about 3mm from a 180C heat source.

3D Doodler [kickstarter.com] already has one of these things. Theirs seems to work, although they speed up the video too. For both, the results look like Silly String. [wikipedia.org]

As one of the comments points out, where they claim the video shows 13cm extruded in about 5 seconds the actual amount extruded is nearer to 3cm. Using the same assumptions that the article makes 3cm in 5 seconds is well within the power available from the USB port.

* It preheats some element or reservoir for a limited time duty cycle* It just draws more power from USB ; powerbanks happily support 2A and the '900mA specced USB port' on their macbook might also capable of delivering much more.* The pen includes a rechargable battery capable of delivering more peak current. The pen could easily hold a 1Ah 3.7V lithion cell.* They provide an adapter to plug it in 2 USB ports* *

It wouldn't have to have a motor to drive the filament. It may work like a mechanical pencil where pushing a button/lever under your finger will feed the filament into the hot-end. It would certainly be simpler and smaller that way.

electric power at all by using something like one of those propane powered cordless soldering irons. A small flame could melt the plastic and a mechanism like that used in a mechanical pencil could use finger power to push the plastic into the hot-end.

I commented on a different site that their video was crappy. It was 1.5 minutes of self promoting douche bags showing nothing. Then a bunch of useless examples of the pen starting something and then poof done, just like a crappy 80s cooking show. Then in the end I saw no purpose for the stupid pen. Basically beyond some crappy 60's style art about the most useful thing they did was oddly repair a horribly torn shirt.

So to find out that these douchebags are not probably able to deliver surprises me not. I

Congratulations I believe you have just described every political ad back to the 70s. For the record, they worked especially well during the last four political elections. What does this have to do with the pen. Everything. Its marketing.

The 3Doodler exists, and people were making devices like that from spare 3D printer extruders for many years before that, so there's no doubt that you can melt and extrude ABS.

The only question with the Lix is whether they can convert power into melted ABS efficiently enough to do so from a USB port. Technically USB 3 can provide 100 watts of power, which is far more than is needed to melt and extrude plastic. So if USB 3, with its power budget, is their target, it's doable.

I double checked their Kickstarter, and they say that it comes with a USB cable and a USB power supply, that it works with USB 3 and they're looking into a USB 2 solution. So they're not saying that the LIX will work on any USB port, they're saying that it'll work on their USB power supply, and with USB 3 (which has a much higher power budget, optionally). Given that running an extruder off of a battery is a dumb idea (it likely draws as much or more power than your laptop), running on wall power makes sens